Vienna, city of music.
Often considered as the world classical music capital, Vienna has been home of the most important composers in history. Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Chopin spent a consequent part of their careers in this city.
Vienna has a strong musical heritage, and is still very active in the world of classical music.
But today there is a need of an institution, a building that would transmit this prestigious culture. A place that would gather the two ways of sharing music : teaching and performing. This building would be the keeper of the musical culture of Vienna, transmitting it to the next generations, and displaying the best current musicians at the same time and in the same place.
The preliminary question and main stake has been raised in the last decade by leading offices such as Snohetta, BIG, and OMA, who shifted the focus when designing a concert hall from the beauty and iconic status of the concert hall to its capacity to work as a main public place in the city.
This project tries to address this question by mixing the program with a music school, resulting in a more porous building used by a wider category of persons ; and by housing a public plaza between its two programs. Visitors would go through the building with views on the music school to access the foyer and the auditorium, or just to go up on the plaza.
The way the project addresses the first challenge is bringing a second one. When designing a building with two types of programs, and therefore (at least) two types of users, how and where to separate them, how to make them meet. We could even wonder if they should meet at all, or have their very own parts of the project. The Wiener Musikhaus is somehow based on the principle of a table. A table is the object that allows people to meet (meals, meetings, tribunals, interviews, debates, all these places need tables). It allows people to meet first because it separates them. It is bringing people close to each other while ensuring that they wont come too close. The project uses this principle to create an intermediate outdoor plaza between the two programs. It separates the two entities to give them their identity and at the same time brings the neutral place where both can meet. It is the boundary and the link between the two programs.